


Blame it on Paris

by halfwit



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bring the hankies, Cas is studying abroad, Castiel/Dean Winchester One Shot, College Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean has a Fear of Flying, Emotional Hurt, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, I cried writing this, I don't know why I wrote this, I'm Sorry, M/M, Missed Opportunities, One Shot, Paris is beautiful, Sad Castiel, Sad Ending, Set in Paris, Starts out cute, What Was I Thinking?, engagements, this is not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:43:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3170252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfwit/pseuds/halfwit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel is spending a semester studying abroad in Paris. He loves the food and the culture, but he misses his boyfriend, Dean, especially when they have to spend their anniversary apart. Castiel is awaiting a special gift from Dean, and his life is going to change forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blame it on Paris

Castiel Novak absolutely loved Paris.

He loved the language, the culture, the museums, and the foods. He found himself flourishing. The classes he was able to take were challenging and creative, and so different from what he was used to in the States. He almost could be content to live here for the rest of his life. The only detraction to the beautiful azure of the Parisian sky and the tranquil lapping of the Seine was the absence of Castiel’s longtime boyfriend, Dean Winchester. Sometimes Cas found it ironic, here he was in the city of love, and he was missing the love of his life.

Okay, so maybe everything wasn’t picture perfect in Cas’ day. Today was a special day after all. Not only was it a Tuesday, which was Castiel’s only day without afternoon classes, which gave him a chance to get out and explore the city, but it also was September 18, which was his and Dean’s six year anniversary. The young Novak wishes he could spend the day with his boyfriend, but Dean is terrified of flying, and Castiel didn’t have enough money and not enough time to take off class to go home to see him.

Strolling through one of the local _arrondissements_ , Cas pulled out his cellphone and smiled when he saw Dean’s text from yesterday.

_> >From Dean: Hey Cas. Happy early anniversary. I have a special present for you, it should be there about 2 pm. Hope you like it ;). Love you._

Dean wasn’t one of grand gestures or major romantic pronouncements, but Castiel always knew that his boyfriend loved and cherished him more than almost anything on the planet. With the two of them preparing to graduate in the spring, Cas almost hoped that Dean’s gift would be a proposal. He was ready for the two of them to make the commitment to spend the rest of their lives together. Despite how much he hoped for a proposal – and their anniversary would be an awesome day for such an occasion – he really wanted Dean to do it in person.

Then again, Castiel started thinking, browsing through the small bookstore on the corner, not that far from the flat he was renting, maybe he didn’t have to wait for Dean. That’s it! Castiel grinned, lit up from the inside as a plan started to form. He immediately abandoned the bookseller’s establishment and almost sprinted the several blocks to a tiny jewelry store. The store caught his attention almost from his first day in Paris. The storefront was so small that there only was room for one display case and an old-fashioned cash register.

However, the inside of the store wasn’t what arrested the young man’s attention each day – that honor was reserved for its window where several pieces were displayed tastefully. One ring in particular caught Castiel’s eye from the beginning, it was a silver band that would almost look plain except for the weaving pattern of the material, forming a rope or a knotted pattern. The ring was perfect because it described all the many ways that Dean’s and Cas’ lives had become interwoven over their six years together. Also, because the ring was so non-descript, it fit Dean’s personality perfectly.

Purchase secured, Castiel practically skipped back to his flat. He felt so happy. Today was going to be the day that he proposed to Dean Winchester. They would get to finally start planning the rest of their lives together.

The young man stopped at a nearby café and purchased a small meal. He glanced at his watch and saw it was getting close to the time that Dean told him to expect his surprise. Deciding to get back to his flat to be prepared for whatever the oldest Winchester had in store for him, Cas left a tip on the table and strolled back to his apartment. Excited to see what the rest of the day would bring.

*****

By nine that evening, Dean’s surprise still hadn’t arrived. Although Castiel tried not to let himself get too disappointed, he tried to convince himself that it was the thought that counted. Actually the thing he was more upset with was that he wasn’t able to get in touch with Dean. Sure, he received the text yesterday wishing him a happy, early anniversary, but there had been radio silence from his boyfriend on their actual anniversary. Castiel tried to call him several times, but always the call went straight to voicemail. As soon as the message picked up, Cas hung up. There was no sense leaving a message, Dean would just call him whenever he could.

To distract himself, Cas turned on the television. The one drawback to Paris? Not as many mind-numbing viewing options, especially for poor college students trying to do a semester abroad on the cheap. As he flipped through the few stations he did get, he kept coming back to news footage of a plane crash. After skipping over the report ten times, he finally decided to watch to see what happened.

From what he could gather with his intermediate level of French was the plane was flying from Boston to Paris when there had been a malfunction in the engine. The aircraft was within twenty minutes of landing, but the pilot was not able to sustain altitude and the plane crashed about five miles from the airstrip. Miraculously no civilians were harmed, but all passengers and crew on the plane had been killed instantly. Cas shuddered when he thought of that, and for the first time was counting his lucky stars that Dean had a phobia about flying. He couldn’t even get him to go on the Magic Carpet ride at Disney World, and that wasn’t even that high off the ground.

Named for the Angel of Thursday, Castiel had been raised in a religious household. He had lost some of his faith as he got older and realized he was gay. In times such as this, he found himself reverting to old habits. He offered a quick prayer to God to look after the families that the passengers and crew left behind.

Sad he hadn’t heard from Dean, but too tired to wait up any longer, Castiel turned on his alarm and settled in to bed for the evening.

*****

The sound of his phone blaring woke Castiel out of a sound sleep. His eyes were heavy and still blurry from sleep, he didn’t know what time it was, but he felt as though he just had closed his eyes moments before. Who was calling him at this hour? Maybe it was Dean, finally calling to say happy anniversary.

“Better late than never,” Castiel grumbled in greeting as he answered the phone.

_“Castiel?”_ a feminine voice greeted from the other side of the phone. It took his sleep-addled brain a minute to realize it was his mother calling.

“Mom?” he asked, uncertain if he was hearing right. “What are you doing calling me so late, early, what time is it even?”

_“Castiel, it is late, honey, but I needed to call to tell you something. It is not good news.”_

At that, Castiel was wide awake, any vestiges of sleep erased from his thoughts. He felt like his reflexes were now overly sharp. He never liked phone calls in the middle of the night, they always signaled bad things. A middle of the night phone call informed him that his father – a police officer – had been shot in the line of duty. A middle of the night phone call notified him that his grandfather had a stroke. To say that Cas was on high alert right now was an understatement.

“What is it, Mom? What’s the matter? Are you okay? Are Mikey and Luc okay?” Cas wracked his brain to think what could be wrong with his mother or his brothers.

_“We are fine, sweetie. I needed to tell you about Dean.”_

Ice filled Castiel’s veins, and a cold shiver of dread worked its way down his spine, did this have something to do with why he didn’t get a call from Dean on their anniversary? Why his present never showed up? Had Dean cheated on him? Was Dean Okay? Castiel’s thoughts were bouncing in every direction almost as though someone had taken a carton of bouncy balls and let them boing free all over a padded room.

“What about Dean?” Castiel asked, voice pitched higher and more breathless than usual.

_“I don’t know how to tell you this, Sam and John actually wanted to be the ones to tell you, but I thought it would be easier coming from me, but now I don’t know. I don’t know if I can,”_ his mother exclaimed, and Cas could finally hear the snuffling sounds that she was trying to hold back. Those were the sounds of his mother crying.

“Mom, you’re scaring me,” Castiel said, feeling tremors start to take over his body. The anticipation of what his mother was going to say was excruciating. Surely whatever happened couldn’t be that bad.

_“It was going to be so beautiful,”_ his mother began wistfully. _“Dean came to see me last month and asked me if I would give him my blessing to propose to you. After I stopped crying like a school girl that my baby was going to be getting married, I gave him my blessing without reservation._

_“Although he wasn’t big on grand gestures, he felt this deserved one. He booked a ticket to fly to Paris to surprise you. His flight departed late at night on the seventeenth and was scheduled to arrive on your anniversary. He wanted his presence and the proposal to be your anniversary present.”_

His mother took a deep, ragged breath at this point, almost as though she was steeling herself to deliver a harsh blow. But, this sounded amazing. How ironic that he and Dean were thinking the exact same thing. Maybe Dean came down with something last minute that kept him from getting on a plane. Imagine, Dean Winchester on a plane. That’s a sight he would pay real money to see; his boyfriend was always terrified of flying in the metal death traps as he called them. Castiel chuckled to himself while waiting for his mother to continue. He was always afraid he was going to get on one and the plane was going to fall out of the sky. Wait? What? Holy shit!

“Mom,” Castiel said, urgently. His brain making too many connections, and he was sure he was just being paranoid, of course he was being paranoid. There is no way that what he was thinking is what happened. “Where is Dean?”

_“He’s gone, sweetheart,”_ Naomi Novak said as gently as possible. Her heart breaking for her youngest son. _“The plane he was on had a mechanical failure about twenty minutes from the airport, and it crashed. From what we were told, there were no survivors.”_

He couldn’t breathe. Castiel heard the words that his mother was saying, but it was like they were coming from the bottom of the ocean, the connection sounded even more faraway than it had at the beginning. He tried to draw air into his lungs, but nothing was working. He knew he needed to breathe, knew there was something he should be saying, but none of this was real. Of course it wasn’t real. He was just upset from watching that news footage before bed. This was all just a nightmare. He would wake up and he would call Dean and everything would be okay.

_“Mikey and Luc are on their way to get you,”_ his mother was continuing. _“They should be there in about eight to ten hours. I figured you would want to come home.”_

“Of course, Mom,” Castiel said, his voice sounding wild and almost unhinged. “But, I better get going. If I am going to wake up from this, I have to go back to sleep first.”

_“Sweetie…”_ his mother began.

”Talk to you when I wake up and the nightmare has ended,” Castiel said, chuckling with a slight hint of manic energy attached to it.

He immediately ended the call and laid back down on his bed and tried to close his eyes.

“This is all just a dream,” he kept repeating to himself. “You just have to close your eyes and when you wake up it will be Wednesday and this will all be over.”

Try as he might, sleep wouldn’t come. After two hours of closing his eyes only to have them fly back open again like blinds being snapped open too quickly. He needed to find some way to convince himself he was dreaming. Of course, he would try to call Sam. There is no way in this dream world that Sam would be awake, and there is no way he would repeat the same story as his mother.

Fumbling for the phone he discarded so abruptly after his talk with his mother, Castiel clumsily dialed Sam’s number. The phone answered on the third ring.

_“H-He-Hello,”_ a broken voice answered. That was not Sam Winchester answering, it was his girlfriend, Jessica Moore, and she sounded like her world had just ended.

“Jess,” Cas breathed, reality crashing down around him. This wasn’t a dream, it was a fucking nightmare, but it wasn’t one that he was able to wake up from. “Please tell me my mother is wrong. Tell me that my boyfriend did not get his cowardly ass on a plane for the first time in history to propose to me, and then have the shittiest luck known to man and leave me.”

_“I am so sorry, Cas,”_ she said, trying to keep her voice even. Through the new haze of pain that was rapidly descending on him, Castiel knew Jessica would take Dean’s loss hard, too. Dean was the big brother she never had. She was able to get him to do any crazy thing with her for a laugh. They were best friends. Cas and Sam often joked that maybe they should be jealous that their significant others were going to hook up and leave them high and dry. Then, Jess and Dean would attack hug their boyfriends and smother them with kisses to show they had nothing to worry about.

“I don’t want you to be fucking sorry, Jessica,” Castiel spat, venom and pain making his words harsh. Later, he might regret what he said. Now, the wounds were too raw, the pain too visceral. “I want you to fucking tell me this is the worst joke that anyone ever has played on me.”

_“I would give anything for that to be the case,”_ she replied brokenly. _“I know it wasn’t the same thing, but I loved him, too, you know?”_

Castiel disconnected the call and collapsed onto his bed, grief weighing him down like a physical presence. Only yesterday morning, the future had seemed so bright. He and Dean were going to live happily ever after.

“Damn you, Dean,” Castiel shouted into the blackness of his flat. “You stupid bastard. Why? Why now would you decide to get on a plane? All you had to do was wait two more months and we could’ve been together forever.”

Tears were pouring down his face, sobs catching in his throat, the sounds he was making didn’t sound human, but as though there was a dying animal that needed to be put down.

“You can’t leave me,” he sobbed into his pillow. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Scrabbling once again to find his phone, Castiel dialed Dean’s cellphone. He didn’t care if he didn’t get him, he just wanted to hear his voice, even if on a message. When the message picked up, Castiel let it play through.

_“Hey, it’s Dean, I can’t answer the phone for the next few days because I am going to be in Paris celebrating my engagement to the greatest guy in the world, hoping he says yes to me. Don’t worry, because once I get back to the States all y’all will be invited to me and Cas’ big day. Gotta go, they are boarding this hunk of metal I have to get on. The things I do for love. Cas I hope you aren’t listening to this before I get a chance to propose to you.”_

_< Beep!>_

Over the next three hours, Cas wore out his cellphone battery calling back and listening to that message. At the unbridled love and hope his fiancé – because that is what he was – had when he recorded it. Castiel marveled at how out of character all of this was for Dean. Dean felt things deeply, but he was always afraid to let people see his sensitive side, he usually reserved that for Sam, Jess, and Cas. But, for him to record that message? He was filled with an exuberance and optimism he wanted to share with the world. Cas hated every minute of it.

By the time Mikey and Luc arrived at his doorstep, Castiel had his entire flat packed. He wasn’t taking much back with him. He had contacted his professors and informed them he was withdrawing from his classes and going home. Given his circumstances, none of the professors held it against him. Though he was past the withdraw period for the semester, he would not be failed. Not that he cared. He could have flunked every class and it would have meant nothing. He would enroll next semester to finish out his credits and graduate, but his hope for the future was gone.

He greeted his brothers with reddened eyes and a runny nose, his duffle bag slung over his shoulder, and a silver ring on the third finger of his left hand. It was time to go home.

As he left the building, he took notice of his surroundings. The sky was no longer azure blue, but a muted blue-gray. The bustling sounds of the market grated at his nerves. He questioned why he ever had been enamored with Paris in the first place. He knew he would never return to this city, this would always be the place where his love, heart, and future died in a fiery blaze, and he would always blame it on Paris.

Castiel Novak absolutely loathed Paris.

**Author's Note:**

> I know that I love hurt Dean, but this was a little extreme even for me. Sheesh! I cried through the whole ending, and I was the one writing it. I swear I am going to write something happy next time - or at least not so depressing.
> 
> Let me know what you think. Love it? Hate it? I'd love to hear from you.


End file.
